An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Eight -- I wrote an ugly adjective

I've been threatening you with adjectives for some time, and now here they are, falling like a piano. I think of all the topics that we've covered, adjectives are the one that trip me the most. It took me a long time to realise why, and it's a personal thing.

You know how people say that they are visual? Well, I'm the complete opposite. When I read physical descriptions in novels, it goes in one eye and out the other. I really struggle to 'see' things. Instead, I'm very auditory: I always think of things in terms of sound, and to a lesser degree, smell. So, the visual language of my text is often composed of very broad-brush things, like light and complexity and scale, and I struggle to write small visible details. Because of this I hate describing characters!

And of course, that's where adjectives pop up the most: descriptions.

Firstly, though, before we really get stuck in, we have some more grammar. Oh, yes. No, concentrate, this is important. To help us, let's pick up where we left off with Sheena.

I don't know if you remember, but Colin the polar bear had just turned up with the new photocopier. Late, again: Colin has a real time management issue. He hasn't even changed out of his swimming costume, but that's OK, because he's, you know, a polar bear, and dress codes are different for them.

Anyway. As you probably remember from school, an adjective modifies a noun. What you might not know is that there are broadly two categories: attributive adjectives, and predicative adjectives. People get worked up into a froth about adjectives, but the ones that haters really hate are the attributive ones. So which is which?

Attributive adjectives come before the noun.

Colin put down the battered photocopier. His striped bathing suit was still wet. He looked miserable.

Here 'battered' and 'striped' are attributive. They are paired with a noun. The thing that the haters hate about them is that often they are just word gunk; they clog the tubes of our writing engines with unnecessary letters. In this case, you could say that they have a point: knowing that the photocopies is battered and that his swim suit is striped adds colour to the scene, but do we need it? I'm not sure.

The other type, predicative, come after a verb. Often, we see them as part of a 'to be' clause, but not always. 'Wet' and 'miserable' are predicative adjectives in our example, and the verbs here are 'was' and 'looked'. If you want to get technical (and I will still respect you if your eyes glaze over as you read this sentence) the predicative adjective is doing the job of a noun in a sentence, as the object.

The overwhelming majority of adjectives can be either. You can stick any of the adjectives we used above in a predicative or attributive position: use the test sentence 'Colin's attributive bathing-suit was predicative', to try it. So why bother differentiating between them?

The answer is that you use different techniques to decide if the two types are paying their way, and if they aren't, different techniques to remove them. Attributive adjectives are often little barnacles, hanging on the underside of our ships, weighing us down, not giving us much back. Predicative adjectives, on the other hand, are needed to make a verb work, and so we get a little more from them. Now, the verb 'was' is the weakest of all the verbs, and when that's the verb you used to construct a predicative adjective they don't tend to be much more valuable than attributive adjectives. However, I notice that the adjectives that end up as predicative adjectives seem to draw attention to something important or interesting, so maybe they are just generally a little more valuable to the text.

In my above example I had one 'was' and one filtering verb – looked – so frankly I could do better.

But first, let's talk about different levels of adjectival quality.